During the previous Linux meetup Nadim invited me to visit his workplace and meet his boss who’s also an open source advocate. While being on-call this week I am pretty free during day time. So, I grabbed this opportunity to visit them today.

Their office is a short ride from the beach actually; a nice & cozy place in Grand Baie. I like the northern weather. In fact, while driving north I enjoyed the blue sky & some green scenery along the way. I reached Grand Baie exactly at noon as I had informed Nadim. He was waiting for me on the roadside. I met him and we both went for lunch at Grand Baie La Croisette. We discussed on the possibility of having some future Linux or MSCC meetup in the north. I don’t mind … besides I like travelling to various places meeting new folks & sharing the spirit of open knowledge. It’s fun & meetup in the north would be fun too. Our only issue is transport. I should be working on that & come up with a solution. I shared some of my crazy ideas regarding open source advancement in Mauritius & also the open government platform that has been cooking up in my mind since long.

We then went back to Nadim’s office. I like the interior & woohooo, they have some awesome 1080P HD monitors. The perfect geek desktop. I plugged my laptop & we continued chatting.

A short while later Christophe came, Nadim’s boss. Nadim introduced us & we talked about work stuffs in general. I explained a bit about my nature of work as an Application Management Engineer. We had an awesome geek chat involving various topics like Amazon Web Services, Git, Server auto-deployment etc. I shared a little bit about YaST, WebYaST & AutoYaST features that could be useful for mass deployment of SUSE servers.

Christophe Parmentier

We talked about the LUGM & MSCC meetups happening & also the quality of local bandwidth. Yup, the last part is deplorable indeed. I have written about this in my previous articles as well, the concept of Cyber Island will remain a “mirage” until we have enough of locally deployed web services… and that is not going to happen with the poor bandwidth that we have. Christophe shared a lot of ideas that we can implement locally which I believe are possible with the support of Linux enthusiasts/hobbyists. I like their office setup, it reminded me the times at Linkbynet. We kinda had the same casual getup while working.

I also met Virginia, a charming lady who complimented me as having a “strong voice”. Ahaan… A first time someone telling me that, liked it.

I left Grand Baie around 16h00. It rained earlier but the roads were fine. Summing-up, I spent a great afternoon sharing geek ideas that if implemented, will benefit our local fellows a lot. I’m going to share the same during the upcoming meetups & see how folks react.